Paul Westerberg

“Stick with your heart and you'll be fine.”

“It's my first record since my son is old enough to understand and I can't even show it to him. Yes, it's affected me, probably in the opposite of how anyone would have thought.”

“I don't think there's anything that will make me stop doing it. There may be a time when it's not available to anyone. You may have to come listen at my basement window... but I can't stop.”

“Any musician who can stop may be a musician, but they're no artist. If it's in your blood, it can't stop flowing.”

“The best I can say is that it's better for me to write about despair and darkness than to be incapable of getting off the sofa. It's better to write about suicide than to contemplate it too heavily.”

“I'm beyond caring what anyone expects of me anymore.”

“I didn't wake up one morning and not be in the Replacements. We're all that forever, and I've just grown older. I mean, I haven't lost anything. I've gained a few things.”

“I have my own language and it's high time I put a little of it out there.”

“The truth is overrated.”

“Right now, it hasn't affected my music other than the fact that I don't have time to write any of it. That's no different from when I first started and I lived at home. I would play the guitar in the afternoon and then my mom or my dad would come home and I'd have to quit.”

“I think of the Replacements only when they're brought up to me. For two years, I'm at home, they don't really cross my mind. I still hear them on the radio. I'm not ashamed of anything we did.”

“Reading music is like listening to flowers. I don't understand the concept.”

“The hack songwriter will write the absolute truth every single word, whether it makes a great song or not.”

“Although, my experience when I've been depressed, not only am I too depressed to sit down and write a song, I'm too depressed to pick up my feet. So if you can at least write about it, you're halfway away from it.”

“Actually, I've done it the other way so many times where you rehearse the band and you do the whole thing with lights, the show and the crew - everything. Then you see what happens and you're already committed to dates. I'm just sort of putting out feelers this way.”

“I think it should be evident by now, but I'm as lost as anyone.”

“I read The Bell Jar, and then I read her memoir and her diaries, and a third book, an outside opinion. Just the way she made the pillows so neat on the oven door. It just seems to be the opposite of, if you're going to take your life, in a horrible rage it happens.”

“It's like, it's up to the people to fall in love with the song. The record company can only do so much.”

“I'm hard-pressed to think of a lot of great rock movies.”

“It's fun, but the fun is where it always was. I mean, it's still fun to strap on my Les Paul in the basement and turn up the Marshall amp. I'm still 15. I still enjoy that as much as I ever did.”